debwhite0215- Are you talking about simply having your plants get pollinated or are you trying to prevent cross pollination? These are two very different things. Cross pollination is when two varieties of the same type of plants pollinate each other. Like if one variety of eggplant pollinated a different variety of eggplant, that would be cross pollination. If you saved the seeds from a cross and planted them you wouldn't know what to expect from the resulting plants. If you are just talking about making sure your plants get pollinated, most veggies are self pollinating but obviously it's always better to plant more than one. Not only for pollination reasons but also because you just aren't going to get much from only one plant (tomatoes and zucchini being exceptions). little_minnie- The misinformation in gardening does bug me a bit. There is a ton of very persistent misinformation that surrounds heirloom, open pollinated, hybrid, and GMO seeds. Everybody wants heirloom, non-hybrid, and non-GMO seeds (not that home gardeners can get GMO seeds) because they want to save their own seeds. And I'm always telling people they don't have to stick with just heirlooms, they can save open pollinated seeds as well and that if they don't prevent cross pollination it won't matter if something is non-hybrid because they'll end up with hybrids in the end. Needless to say, that farmer saying that hybrids are sterile and not able to cross with heirlooms would have frustrated the hell out of me if I saw it. :) A little off-topic but still somewhat relevant. Rodney

There is a lot to be said for letting them pollinate as they will, or at least keeping several plants of the same variety next to each other and letting them cross pollinate. It doesn't happen as quickly with peppers, tomatoes, and other plants that easily self pollinate, but there is something known as Inbreeding Depression, where plants grown from lines without enough external fertilization will slowly degrade and become less and less productive. The older farmers would talk about crops wearing out, thats exactly what they were talking about. Corn is especially bad at that, needing a fairly large number of plants to keep the line healthy (upwards of 200 individual stalks), otherwise you'll see productivity loss within a half dozen generations or so. Not sure how long peppers can go before it becomes a problem though.

If this is your new hobby then I would suggest trying to do a little bit of everything saving seeds is just one part of it. This being my first year growing from seed I am going to try and save some viable true seeds of some of my plants but i will also buy seeds next year for some new varieties. If you want the seeds to stay true you have to isolate the whole plant or just individual blossoms. I guess you could also wait for the bloom to open and manually pollinate it and then put yarn or string around the stem of that particular bud. Dale

"I was wondering what sort of tomato you would get if you crossed a currant tomato (L. pimpinellifolium) with a good beefsteak. Would the flavor probably be decent if both parents tasted good? Also, how much larger than a cherry tomato would it be?" [Scott] I'm thinking the flavor would be a subdued median of the flavor profile of the two parents. However, in many cases, that would be sweeter than the beefsteak parent but not so sweet as the L. pimp. parent. I'm thinking the size of the resulting F1 tomato would be approximately the square root of the sum of the two parents' weights or diameters, whichever you're measuring by. In other words, if the average weight of the beefsteak parent were 18 ounces and the weight of the L. pimp. fruit were 1/2 ounce, the F1 fruit probably would run about 3 ounces, maybe a bit less. I'm also thinking that if you want to look at and taste what might be representative of a beefsteak x L. pimp. type cross, you might try Gardener's Delight/Sugar Lump ... just as a guess on my part.